You know that noise where it sounds like someone is pulling the record playing thing across an old vinyl record? Yeah, insert that noise {HERE}.
"What the heck happened to our lawn?", we shouted!
Voles. Voles happened to our lawn. And our raised patio bed. And our compost pile. Oh. My. Heck. Our entire lawn, from our bedroom on the 2nd floor, looks like an out in space photo of earth from NASA.
They are everywhere. Our neighborhood and the entire surrounding area were hit hard this winter with the voles. We have it the worst in our neighborhood, however. I believe it is because we have 2 sides of our property that are surrounded by open prairie. And a meadow pond. And no dogs or cats in our home. Or small running children, for that matter. Mercy. What a mess.
The area beyond our "yard" in the right top corner is full of their trails as well. We are literally surrounded by the nasty little buggers.
So, we called an exterminator to drop poison into their holes (which were everywhere!!), and we also made homemade bait traps from PVC.
And below is from the top looking down into where I put the bait. We used the twist off junctions, and no glue was needed for this application. I also added some peanuts with the bait to try to tempt the voles in for the bait even more. I also bought some large U-shaped pegs at the garden store to keep the traps upright and to discourage kids from picking them up. The traps took less than an hour to make 4 of them, and each one is about 3 feet long total.
We hope that we have at least killed them off now. We started on March 15th...an appropriate day for killing something, right? (Ides of March...haha). Now to go about trying to help our lawn recover. It looks like all of my perennials and rose roots survived the invasion, but I'm not so certain about the outcome of my hostas. Time will tell.
This is another picture from upstairs showing the side yard. (it appears my windows need a spring cleaning from outside---oh fun!)
And finally, a few close ups of the damage.
And below is our "natural" vole killer....a.k.a. "Sirus", the neighborhood
kitty. Normally I stay far away from him because I am very allergic to cats.
I'm sure he was confused when I called to him...haha. Hey, I needed a picture
of him out hunting in our back prairie!
So, do you feel my VOLE pain? Have you encountered the nasty voles in your own yard? Tell me how you eradicated them and fixed the destruction they left behind. I really would love to hear your secrets and success stories!
